Test Tube Tiger

Plans to clone the Tasmanian Tiger have captured the public's imagination. But many cloning researchers think attempts to bring extinct animals back to life are as fanciful as movies like Jurassic Park. Catalyst reporter Jonica Newby investigates the science behind cloning the Tasmanian Tiger. Is it really possible, what are the challenges that lie ahead and what do the critics say about the Australian Museum's "miraculous thylacine cloning project".

Broadcast:
Thu 21 Feb 2002, 9:00pm

Published:
Thu 21 Feb 2002, 9:00pm

Transcript

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Narration: One hundred and twenty six years ago, by chance, a baby thylacine was preserved in alcohol rather than formalin. That meant it's DNA was preserved too, and that has allowed one of the most audacious projects in science today - the plan to resurrect the thylacine.

Prof. Mike Archer : Personally, I think this is the most exciting biological project that's going to occur in this millennium.

Narration: If they succeed, if they can actually extract the DNA from this creature and produce a living, breathing thylacine, it will be paradigm shifting science, like landing on the moon. But many scientists believe this project is nothing more than an expensive fantasy.

Prof. Marilyn Renfree: I think the scientific community thinks it's a very long shot.

Dr Ian Gunn: If it could be done, then it would be a tremendous breakthrough that would change the face of science. I hope it could be done, but I don't believe it can be done.

Mike Archer: It seems to me that science is littered with the kinds of statements people make about what we can't do because of the technology we have available to us right now.

Prof. John Shine: But if you look at the enormous pace that's been made in, especially in genetics over the last several years, you cannot rule anything out as impossible.

Narration: The reason many scientists are sceptical is that the two major obstacles are huge. Take the process of cloning. Once the thylacine's DNA has been catalogued and reconstructed, the team plan to insert it in the egg of a related marsupial, a Tasmanian Devil and produce a thylacine clone. We now tend to think cloning is easy. But scientists like Professor Marilyn Renfree, World authority on marsupial reproduction, know how hard it still is.

Prof. Marilyn Renfree: Extraordinarily difficult. Dolly took, Dolly was one egg in 277 fertilisations, so there were 277 nuclei put into 277 enucleated eggs and we got one Dolly.

Narration: And Dolly isn't perfect - she has a shortened lifespan, malformed organs. If we can't even solve the problems with common barnyard animals, how can we expect to clone the less well understood marsupials like the Tasmanian Devil, or tiger.

Prof. Marilyn Renfree: It's not very likely.

Prof. Mike Archer : But the ability to get successful outcomes seems to be steadily increasing. It's taking fewer and fewer goes to get good outcomes. I'd hope by the time we're at that stage of the project, if we've gotten that far, that technology will have overcome these obstacles to increasing the success rate of clones.

Narration: Given enough time, it is foreseeable that the difficulties in cloning will prove surmountable. But well before the project reaches that point, there's a far more fundamental barrier. This soup started life as a well structured set of sweet corn kernels on a cob. The big question is - could scientists take this, and reconstruct it to make the original, perfectly formed corn on the cob.

And that's the biggest problem the museum team face. Because after 100 years of preservation in alcohol, they don't have intact, well structured, well organised sets of DNA. What they have is chopped up DNA soup. Like corn kernels on a cob, DNA is normally organised onto X shaped structures called chromosomes. The chromosomes in turn sit inside a nucleus, and the whole package sits inside a cell.

Unfortunately, when the thylacine pup was preserved in alcohol, the nucleus and chromosomes were blown apart.

Dr Ian Gunn: To construct a nucleus and the DNA is virtually asking someone to construct a new species. To me, impossible.

Prof Mike Archer: I find that sort of strange. I'm not a geneticist as you know, I'm a palaeontologist. But I'm very fascinated by the geneticists discussions and what I find is some geneticists are negative about it, but other geneticists are saying this is not going to be such a conceptual problem.

Narration: One supportive geneticist is Dr John Shine, Director of the Garvan Institute of Medical Research, which is backing the project.

Dr John Shine: I keep coming back to the fact of the exponential growth in this type of technology and although we can't see the answer today, if we look back into history, it would be a very brave person that says the answer is not there.

Prof Mike Archer: Bottom line, can it be done? We've got a lot of challenges in front of us. I don't know whether we're ever going to succeed. I do suspect that we are asking for things to be done that are out in front of technology today. But technology will catch up.

Narration: But even if it could be done, should it be done? Dr Ian Gunn thinks not. He's worried it is distracting attention from more practical conservation projects.

Dr Ian Gunn: Resources are very minimal and my question is why try and recreate a species that is completely extinct and has no role or place back in conservation where we are facing other species that we could save, and the resources could go to them quite well and get good results?

Narration: For Ian Gunn, the money issue is all too real. He runs the Gene Bank which preserves the intact DNA of hundreds of Australia's endangered animals. Yet while the highly speculative thylacine project has been attracting funding, the Gene Bank has slipped to the edge of bankruptcy. Although Mike Archer has sympathy with the gene bank's plight, he finds the objection curious.

Mike Archer: What we found out was the people who want to put money into this project have no interest in conventional conservation. They're doing it because they're fascinated by a technologically incredible project. If this project were not on the rails, those same people would not be putting the money into conventional conservation. So I think it's different money we're talking about.

Narration: And that's really the crux of why they're prepared to push such a long shot. Scientists know that these days, the projects that attract the funding are the ones attached to the best story. Even if it doesn't in the near future deliver a thylacine, this is the kind of charismatic project that can drive big science forward.

Prof. John Shine: Look the Garvan is supporting this project because it is good basic research. It's a project that captures the public imagination and that good basic research will give us information that will be very important in treating diseases.

Prof. Marilyn Renfree: Well, if Mike hadn't come up with this idea, you probably wouldn't be here filming and in that sense, he's already achieved one of his objectives in increasing publicity and interest in our marvellous marsupials.